Sonja Cowling

Coming to the end of my year-long placement at a mental health inpatient unit and my time as a core trainee. I have so much love and respect for all the patients that I have gotten to know during this time. They have taught me more than any supervisors or books ever could.

Only a month left of being a psychiatry core trainee. Exams passed, final appraisal passed. What a journey it's been. Excited about what lies ahead as a general adult middle grade psychiatrist.

On aika mieletön kirja vielä seurana! Suomen junat tuntuu nyt Briteistä käsin katsottuna niin luksukselta. Täkäläiset junat on likaisia, ahtaita, haisee ja kolisee.

I would imagine it to be beneficial.

Luckily not working today after a mega busy work week (our ward transferred from a mixed ward to all female and it was hectic!). Hope you have a good shift.

It's so necessary to be able to name things that are offensive and just pure "wrong" but silencing any points of view is just so dangerous. Really loved reading your thoughts on this.

There's so many unappreciated alternative treatments for all sorts of things that actually work. Homeopathy is not one of them. It's one of the alternative treatments that never fails to make me feel furious.

So excited to realise my favourite account is on bluesky 🥰

I wish learning wasn't so expensive. So many courses and conferences I'd love to go to but everything is so expensive.

An excellent piece of writing about freedom of speech and cancel culture.

Nervously waiting to hear whether I get a speciality training post and whether a close colleague gets into core training. 🫣

Lääkärinä voin sanoa että valittaminenkin on ihan ok jos tuntuu että täytyy saada sillä tavalla kurja olo ulos. Ongelma ei ole valittajissa vaan systeemissä, jossa lääkäreillä ei ole enää aikaa muuhun kun tosi akuuttejen vaivojen hoitamiseen.

But boyfriends turn into grumpy old men too!

Phew.

I think for mental health services too more money can't come fast enough. The rush seems pretty justified.

Is Pikachu travelling all by himself?

She looks so thoroughly unimpressed by life.

Gem thinks that to get the benefits of cold water swimming the experience needs to include as much mud as possible.

The Nightingale by Kristin Hannah ended up being my favourite in November even though I initially really didn't warm to it.

eggs in all lines of thinking and I'm so sorry to hear you have been harmed. You would have deserved good care without harm. For myself I see critical psychiatry not as an ideology but more just as a way of critically thinking of the way I practice in the hope of avoiding harming patients.

Context is everything and knowing you've experienced this makes it very understandable that you'd feel this way. Psychiatry and also psychotherapy can absolutely cause harm and I wouls hope that critical psychiatrist especially would understand this and be very mindful of it. There will be bad 1/2

Found this BMJ article eye opening. A bit worrying if the psychedelic studies have really been of such poor quality and reporting so misleading. I think we are so desperate for "miracle" cures that we want to believe when told they might exist.

You've probably seen this more than me. I've only come across a few anti psychiatry psychiatrists on twitter but never in my clinical life. But I do think a lot of clinicians could be a bit more critical. We see more critical thinking on apps like this but I find not as much offline.

Totally agree with this. Also I feel that NHS is so top heavy. A huge amount of managers and non clinical staff. I'm not convinced this affects the clinical quality as much as we'd think. I trained in Finland where clinical care is similarly good but the system is not as non clinically heavy.

I identify with critical psychiatry and not antipsychiatry. Can kind of see how it could be easy to be pulled to "the dark side" in the current climate. The practices within services feel to be so driven by the lack of funding instead of best practice. It could be easy to bark up the wrong tree.

I think we should all be critical psychiatrists. Not being one to me would imply a closed mind that accepts everything in a "I do it this way because this is how things have always been done". Critical psychiatrist to me doesn't mean anti medication. It just means being open to different ideas.

Doesn't hurt that it's very beautiful as well. I'm a bit envious! Enjoy!

Ouch! And how these comments follow us in our minds into adulthood..

Introduce yourself with your worst feedback from school 👇

I'm Sonja, good job I'm clever because I'm certainly not athletic.

We used to get Pharma paid lunches and pens, notepads and other small gifts in medical school. The consultants at the time suggested the bigger gifts, paid travel etc would come after we'd graduate. Then the Pharma companies seemed to disappear. Only representation I see nowadays is ads in journals.